potbsfandomcom-20200213-history
Patch Note:1.0.20.0
We slowed the port conquest unrest rate to what we thought was appropriate due to the higher server population. Then we found out we did it wrong and it was way too slow. It's set correctly now. Among other things, this means that the unrest missions (such as delivering gunpowder to the rebel agent) now contribute significant amounts of unrest, as intended. We've made a number of performance improvements on both the servers and the client that should help your performance in towns and in boarding combat. We're looking forward to your feedback on how these work out. We've got the latest version of localized text from SOE and included it in this build. This has new translations and bug fixes for existing translations. Known issues * Surrendering in PvP puts the "Recently Killed" effect on you. It shouldn't. * We had to wipe your keybindings in this build. If you'd set keybindings other than the defaults, you'll need to set them up again. But now you can set them separately for each language. * We did some work to make battle markers color coded based on whether you could enter them, whether they had groupmates, etc. but we're not done yet. Ignore the coloring in this build and continue to rely on the old solution of mousing over them to see what the text says. We are still working on getting this cleaned up so it's easy to see at a glance the status of all nearby battle markers. Differences between 1.0.17.0 and 1.0.20.0 include but aren't limited to: Missions * The tutorial was trying to set the firing arcs and wind indicator on or off as needed, which didn't work reliably since those preferences are preserved across all characters and servers. We stopped trying to do this so you can use your own settings in the tutorial. * There was a lengthy pause in the tutorial when you clicked the ship in distress before you'd end up in the captain's cabin. We fixed this pause so the transition happens right away. * Sometimes, NPCs in missions would have no names. We fixed this. * PvE Pirate Bounty missions offered no rewards. Fixed that. * Changed the rewards for the Magistrate Commendation missions. They now give out refit packages and a low-rank writ instead of all types of writs. * No Loitering: Tweaked your allies so they'll actually attack your enemies instead of standing around annoyed w/ them. * Increased the level of the opponents in the Fighting School mission chains to make them a little more challenging. * Drake's Ghost: Fixed the magistrate so he advances the mission properly. * Las Ferias de Portobelo: This mission is no longer repeatable. It shouldn't have been to start with. * Like a Cure for Chocolate: It wasn't possible to complete this mission. Fixed that. * The Out-of-Towners: If you failed the encounter, the mission would cancel itself. Fixed that. * Patients Zero: Anastas Danre had no sword and so was unable to attack. Fixed that. * Seventeen Bones: There was no entrance to the encounter. Fixed that. * Shoorai's Antipathy: There was no entrance to the encounter. Fixed that. * The Gunner's Mate: Muenda Audoire had no weapon and so couldn't attack. Fixed that. * 30 Royal Encomiums: This Freetrader mission was offering a nonexistent item as a reward. Fixed that. * Citation of Conquest: This mission was awarding the wrong writ. Fixed that. Ship Combat * Recently we adjusted the colors of ship names in the UI to make them more legible. This had the side effect of applying the same color change to the ship icons in the minimap, where it was very hard to distinguish the colors. We have broken out those color values into their own set and have now adjusted the minimap ship icon colors to be distinct. * The PvP Flag once again protects you from NPC agro in the Open Sea. When we did this before it blocked agro even in ship combat, which was really bad. It now works as intended. * Evade Aggression: This skill now works better at reducing agro from Open Sea NPCs. * Tweaked ad hoc spawn distances to reduce the likelihood of spawning in gun range. * When a groupmate in the Open Sea enters an ad hoc, we now automatically pull in other groupmates who are within 10 miles. We turned this feature off for a few weeks while we fixed some issues. Now that things are better, we're turning this feature back on again. After launch, we will be adding an option to join or decline nearby ad hocs involving a groupmate, but we believe this feature is now working well enough for launch. Swashbuckling * Attack Target: This now-free skill was being given out at level 10 instead of level 1, which was an error. Now all new characters start with this skill, which you can use to order your NPC allies to attack the selected target. * 'Provision Allies: Boarding' had no apparent effect and was lost when it shouldn't have been. Better now. * We optimized server traffic in Boarding combat and Fort combat. This should improve avatar motion lag in boarding combat and make it more responsive. How'd we do? * During avatar combat, we record data on what's happening. We tweaked this data collection so it doesn't cause as much of a performance hit on the zone server when lots of fighting is going on. This should improve avatar motion lag during boarding combat. Economy * It wasn't possible to receive the recipe for the Halifax, preventing creation of Mastercraft versions of it. Fixed that. * A player in the open beta created a new listing in an auction house, but it vanished and the items were lost. Thanks to his bug report and screenshot, we tracked down the incident in the logs and discovered that in some cases of database disruption a transaction could be lost instead of queued for recording. We fixed this issue. Art / UI / Sound * Several NPCs had invisible clothing items (i.e. missing forearms or coats). Fixed these NPCs. * Delivery mission UI text now has readable colors. * Increased the width of the Interact UI to better accommodate foreign translations. * Replaced a bunch of placeholder ("TD") icons with actual icons. * Added a bit more color into the character/ship pictures in the Character Info UI. * Help Window link colors were changed to mirror the Interact UI colors. * When you dragged a skill or item from your toolbar, you saw a piece of text that made no sense. Now we show you the actual name of the thing you are dragging. * We recently made a code change that enabled you to hear many sound effects that were formerly being suppressed. (This was because nearby sounds were still being allowed to play even though their effective volume was 0 due to distance, so they used up sound slots that new and louder sounds couldn't use.) That change in turn meant that all looping sounds would restart the moment you reentered their radius, so you'd hear the beginning of the same sound effect repeatedly as you ran around. Now we keep track of where the loop was when we stopped playing it and resume it at the appropriate time later on. This will enable you to hear many more and diverse sounds. Performance / Stability * In towns with lots of avatars, you would get frequent frame rate drops. We made a performance improvement on the client that should make this better. * We made some improvements on the invisible-avatars problem. It is definitely still happening but we think it will happen less often. This is still a top-priority issue and work is ongoing, but we'd love to know how this first step goes. * Fixed some client crashes that could occur if you zoned while owning the wrong item. * Sometimes a bunch of players will get a meaningless loading screen again and again and again without actually going anywhere. While we still don't understand how this issue gets started, we have figured out how to prevent the symptoms from affecting anyone. You shouldn't see this recurring loading screen anymore. * When servers couldn't talk to each other for some reason, they gave up trying too quickly. We made some configuration changes to be more patient. * Fixed yet another zone server crash on shutdown. While you can't see those, there is some risk of data loss when they occur so we dig into each one we see just in case. * Fixed a database cache-server crash and a dispatch server crash that happened when they lost connection to serverdir. This was the cause of the short-term data rollback that happened last weekend and now it's fixed. * Fixed a login server problem that was caused by bad cache server behavior. We're so glad to have you guys pounding our servers – this is great stuff you're enabling us to find. * Fixed a rare client crash that could occur if you had outfitting in your toolbars and tried to zone at just the wrong time. * Fixed a rare mission server crash that could occur if you somehow managed to get connected to the game twice. We're also working on preventing that getting-connected-twice thing. We think it's caused by something going wrong the first time you try and us never releasing the zombie that resulted. * Fixed a mission server crash that GMs could cause by trying to appear neutral. Also changed things so they can no longer do the thing that was causing the crash in the first place. Misc * Added the word Captain in front of your name in Character Creation so you'd be less tempted to make that your first name. We refer to you as "Captain " all the time in the game, so players who tried to call themselves "Captain Franks" would be referred to as "Captain Captain Franks". That's bad so we try to make it clear up front that you don't need to do that. * In theory, we now have limited macro support. You can create a text file with the extension .do in the Pirates folder under your My Documents folder. In that file, list slash commands like /wave and /say Ahoy! on separate lines. In game, /do and those commands will be run. You can make as many files as you like and each one is essentially its own macro. Note that there's no pause between them so that if you list multiple emotes in a row (or any command that results in an animation being played), you likely won't see all animations because they'll trounce each other. * Keybindings are now language specific. In this way, you can have one set of shortcuts in English and another set in another language. In order to implement this, however, we had to wipe your keybindings so you'll need to re-create them. * Our mouselook speed preference was broken. It was too slow for many people and there was no good way for you to fix it yourself. Should be better now. Category:Beta